Making More than a Name: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Commodification of the Woman Journalist at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Those familiar with Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98) as the vitriolic author of the ‘Girl of the Period’ essays will most likely find this description of her life and autobiography surprising — perhaps even as unsuspected as Linton believed it to be amongst her contemporary audience. Linton’s self-identification as a downtrodden woman trying to withhold and mask her suffering is at odds with the shrill, abusive antifeminist with whom literary critics have struggled in their assessments of Linton as Britain’s first salaried female journalist.3 As critics of Linton have emphasized since the nineteenth century, Linton’s published opinions often sought to ‘impose restrictions where she had insisted upon freedom for herself’,4 demanding more self-restraint than she ever exhibited. The foundational feminist recovery work on Linton, largely biographical in methodology, has focused on just such inconsistencies, particularly between her boundary-breaking career and her advocacy for a conservative, separate spheres ideology.5 It would be easy, then, to dismissively identify the surprising disparity between Linton’s persona in print and her representation of the ‘underlying truth’ of her life as one of the many hypocrisies for which she has been censured both by her own contemporaries and by feminist literary critics. However, I argue that attending to, rather than dismissing, the structuring opposition of Linton’s melodramatic self-presentation — the opposition between reticence and self-revelation, between the author’s private self and the public’s knowledge of her authorial persona — allows us critical insight into concerns endemic for women journalists at the fin de siècle.